Asam, Cosmas Damian (1686-1739) and Egid Quirin (1692-1750).

Brothers; German architects and painters (Egid Quirin also noted for

sculpture and stucco work).

Sons of a painter in the style of the Italian Baroque, the Asam brothers were

born and grew up in Bavaria. They were apprenticed to their father (Hans

Georg), with Egid Quirin also training in sculpture in Munich. Cosmas

Damian certainly and probably Egid Quirin as well went to Rome in 1711,

after their father’s death, for two years. There they attended the Accademia

di S. Luca, Cosmas Damian being awarded the first prize for his brush

drawing of the Miracle of St Pius and Egid Quirin studying the works of

Bernini. Cosmas Damian married on his return to Germany while Egid

Quirin, deeply religious, remained celibate throughout his life. During their

careers both held court appointments and worked on large-scale

commissions. Cosmas Damian subsisted mostly under ecclesiastical

patronage and his brother entirely. All of their many collaborations were on

ecclesiastical projects. Cosmas Damian died in Munich the same year he

built a chapel on his own estate and Egid Quirin died in Mannheim,

reputedly through sustaining a fall from a scaffold while working on

stuccowork and frescoes in a Jesuit church. The Asam brothers are less

renowned for architecture as such (not having trained formally in

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architecture) than for their other respective crafts. The only churches on

which they collaborated in both the decoration and architecture were the

abbey church at Weltenburg, on the river Danube near Regensburg (the

interior completed finally in 1735), and the church of St Johann Nepomuk,

Munich (interior completed in 1746). The latter particularly evokes a

private, intimate atmosphere and creative conception. It was the personal

shrine of Egid Quirin, constructed in the middle of a row of houses bought

by him in 1729 for this purpose and representing the bulk of his fortune. The

roof was elevated in order that Cosmas Damian’s ceiling fresco could be

illuminated without obstruction from the adjoining houses. The St Johann

Nepomuk church displays to a high degree the harmonious and cooperative

combination of the arts of architecture, painting, sculpture and stucco. In this

it is doubly a Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art), being a fine combination

of arts and being wrought through a complete collaboration of two inspired

craftsmen, brothers in trade and in fact. Outside of the sphere of religious

worship, Cosmas Damian worked on a number of castles and private houses,

producing, for example, the staircase fresco at Schleissheim castle near

Munich in 1720 and the fresco in the oval room Alteglofsheim castle near

Regensburg in 1730. His altarpieces more than his frescoes reflect his

father’s training in Roman Baroque painting, exhibiting a greater tendency

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towards chiaroscuro. As his career progressed Cosmas Damian’s colour

schemes grew bolder while he retained his sense of the dramatic enaction in

art of theological concepts. Egid Quirin likewise involved the spectator,

particularly in his superb statuary groups. Even apart from their

collaborative Gesamtkunstwerk, the Asam brothers severally imparted a

lasting and portentous individualism to the German Baroque.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

B. Rupprecht, Die Brüder Asam, 1980.

517 words incl. bibliography